As much as various experts talk about the gender gap that lures more women than men to liberal candidates, race is playing an increasingly pernicious role in American politics, although leaders of both major parties sound embarrassed whenever they talk about it.

The Democrats don`t want to admit how much they have frittered away the support of working-class white males since the days of the 1960s` ``white backlash,`` and Republicans don`t want to admit how much they have capitalized on the way today`s white backlash has turned against issues that should be neutral, like taxes, schools, welfare, crime, rights, values or affordable housing.

Listen, for example, to a Chicago white guy, a carpenter and lifelong Democrat who decided to work for a Republican state senatorial candidate in 1988:

``I`m not a card-carrying Republican-yet. We have four or five generations of welfare mothers. And they (Democrats) say the answer is that we need more programs. Come on. It`s well and good we should have compassion for these people, but your compassion goes only so far.

``I don`t mind helping, but somebody has got to help themselves; you`ve got to pull. Unfortunately, most of the people who need help in this situation are black, and most of the people who are doing the helping are white.``

The quote comes from a perceptive cover article by Thomas Byrne Edsall, political reporter for The Washington Post, and his wife, author Mary D. Edsall, in the May Atlantic, based on research for a new book. Polarized racial politics, including race-coded images and language, changed the course of the 1980, 1984 and 1988 presidential elections and the 1990 elections for the governorships of California and Alabama, the U.S. Senate in North Carolina and the post of Texas secretary of agriculture, the Edsalls say.

They`re right. They also could have mentioned the current Louisiana governor`s race, which recently saw incumbent Democrat Buddy Roemer jump to the Republican Party to run head-to-head against former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke, whose race-coded politics have picked up where his burning crosses left off.

And we can see a racially coded strategy for the 1992 presidential race shaping up in the White House today, as the Bush administration recently sabotaged talks between civil-rights representatives and business leaders that could have resulted in a compromise Civil Rights Act of 1991. It appears the Bush administration would rather keep the issue polarized, even though the language of the administration`s compromise bill is almost identical to that of the bill it opposes.

By promoting a subtle form of racial conflict, a fight Democrats can only lose, Republicans have diverted attention from class conflicts, an issue on which Democrats almost always win.

And what are the Democrats doing about it? Amazingly, not much. Although there are numerous working-class concerns Democrats could be promoting (health care, family leave, Social Security tax reform, affordable housing, just to name a few) up against Republican trickle-down breaks for the rich (capital-gains tax cut, veto of family leave), the party of Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy is behaving as though it doesn`t understand what has hit it.

Let`s face it: People vote in their own self-interest unless they`re nuts or have been thoroughly fooled. If you don`t help them define their interests along lines of class or need, they will define them along some other lines, like race or ethnicity.

And as we can see in commercials almost every day, consumers appreciate the comfortable and comforting images from a familiar past as we make choices about an uncertain future.

If the Democrats need to be reminded that they have a powerful message to sell, all they have to do is look at how often Ronald Reagan, Jack Kemp and other conservative Republicans quoted Roosevelt, Kennedy and Harry Truman when they cleverly forged their new alignment in the `80s.

They were clever enough to realize that those popular Democrats were onto something, and it put them in the White House. It can work again. They don`t have to sell out the interests of the poor or of victimized minorities. They only have to buy into the interests of those who are paying the lion`s share of the bills but have been too distracted by fear of the poor to vote for their interests, instead of their race.